2015

$50,000 to Support Collaborative Study

In November, 2015, Soupy for Loopy Foundation donated $50,000 to support a study to identify new drugs and drug targets by using patient-derived neuroblastoma cells in a unique industry-perfected platform of high-throughput screening. This study is a collaboration between Dr. John Maris at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Dr. Carla Grandori at Cure First in Seattle, Washington that involves the use of laboratory robotics to enable the functional testing of cancer cells with a rapidity and accuracy previously unattainable.

“Soupy for Loopy is committed to funding medical research that will improve survival rates for children diagnosed with neuroblastoma. This collaboration is somewhat unique in that Dr. Maris will provide the patient-derived neuroblastoma samples to Dr. Grandori who will carry out drug sensitivity testing to identify existing drugs or pathways as potential therapies for neuroblastoma more speedily than conventional methods” said Sandra Kosko, President of Soupy for Loopy Foundation.

As noted in the project documents, “the recent characterization and expansion of neuroblastoma patients’ derived samples from the effort of Dr. Maris Laboratory will be essential to identifying novel therapeutic targets and drug combination for tackling chemo-resistant neuroblastoma. As collaborators, Drs. Maris and Grandori are uniquely positioned to unravel potential existing drugs or novel genes and pathways to be targeted for the treatment of neuroblastoma in an unbiased and genome scale fashion.”